Tag: netsquared

This September, I doubled-up on my dosage of “Do-Good Geekery” with back to back Tuesdays at Netsquared events. First, I helped organize the Houston September meetup and then I added a trip ‘Down Under’ to speak at the Melbourne Netsquared in Australia. Here’s my recap from both events, plus links to extra goodies including presentation decks, a resource guide for getting your social media strategy created and driving fundraising dollars through your website, and of course, tons of “Aussie-ome” photos from Australia!

NET2 Tuesday in Houston

Houston Netsquared

The September Houston Netsquared meetup had guest speakers from the Houston CleanWeb Hackathon and Sustainable Houston. Both of these organizations are newly formed nonprofits and are working to grow their community here in Houston around finding ways to make our city more sustainable and “Green”. Our featured presenters, Rosalind Wyatt and Ahshia Berry, shared best practices and tips to utilizing the online data that nonprofits collect from their websites and social networks to create engaging and useful case studies, reports, and other online content. Roz and Ahshia also shared the hurdles Sustainable Houston has faced with their web technology needs, including the value of a geo-location app that would allow Houstonians easily find member organizations that were nearby.

Melbourne Netsquared – Social Media and Fundraising FTW

The morning after Houston Netsquared, I hopped on a plane and headed out to Melbourne, Australia where I had the rare honor of being the Melbourne Netsquared guest speaker. My presentation shared insights into how some nonprofits are successfully increasing their online fundraising through the use of social media networks and how other organizations could translate these success stories into actionable campaigns for their own nonprofit. I’m often asked by both nonprofits and for-profits here in the U.S. how they can generate more revenue and leads from social media marketing. It turns out that Australian nonprofits struggle with many of the same challenges that U.S. nonprofits have, with a couple of key distinctions:

Aussie NPO’s have far more social media profiles than most U.S. NPO’s. In Melbourne, the questions expanded beyond just “how to use Twitter, Facebook, and/or LinkedIn” to include a variety of other networks: Pinterest, Google Plus, YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, etc.

Aussie NPO’s are currently struggling to follow new government regulations on what to do and not to do while engaging on social networks. These regulations present a management challenge that U.S. NPO’s don’t have.

I found it interesting to hear how Aussie nonprofits had similar questions to what I normally hear from my clients and peers here in the United States about how to use social media including things like: engagement best practices, use cases, and managing all of the real time conversations with a limited staff and budget. The Melbourne nonprofits also asked how to figure out which of the channels they could “cull” and how to know what channels would be most effective. My best answer to identifying the best social networks to engage with depends on a number of factors that your social media strategy helps you determine, with the big three factors consisting of:

Learning where your target audience engages most

Finding out who the influencers for your industry are

Determining your resources, including staff, for managing social media campaigns

Find out more about creating a social media strategy for your nonprofit in our new Social Media Strategy Resource Guide:https://www.tendenci.com/social-strategy and here’s my presentation deck from Melbourne Netsquared.

Melbourne’s Best Kept Secret

I was out in Australia to share the “secrets” of incorporating social media and fundraising programs and came back with one of Melbourne’s secrets. The Australians pronounce Melbourne like: “Mel-bin“. I want to send a huge Thank You to Leanne O’Donnell and Richenda Vermeulen – the Melbourne Netsquared organizers! Leanne and Richenda provided me with so much information and support leading up to the presentation and I had a blast switching roles at a Netsquared from organizer to speaker.

According to a recent survey by Constant Contact, 77% of event marketers from small businesses and nonprofit organizations use social media as a complement to their event marketing. The survey cited the top 2 reasons for using social media in conjunction with events were to attract new attendees and to reach past attendees with the overall goal being to increase awareness and attendance at events.

At the May Houston NetSquared meet-up, Wesley Faulkner shared ideas and actionable takeaways for integrating social media with your event marketing strategy. If you are like most nonprofits or small to mid-sized organizations, you may just want to keep reading how to increase awareness and registrations at your upcoming events…

The Big Secret

Wesley saved his Big Secret for event marketing success for the end of the evening’s meeting last Tuesday – so I won’t make you wait any longer to learn it in case you missed the meet-up:

“No event is ever really a failure unless you think it was.”

Take a moment, and let that idea fully sink in… if you are anything like me, this can be a difficult concept to grasp if one of your daily tasks involved managing events for your organization. As event marketers, we all want to say our event sold out, our attendees had the best time ever and we exceeded our Fundraising goal from sponsors and donors.

Let’s call it a Perfect Event when an event accomplishes all 3 of these objectives:

Sold Out

Amazing Attendee Experience

Exceeded Fundraising Goals

Perfect Events are extremely rare for nonprofit organizations. When you are a nonprofit planning an event with little to no budget, a small staff, and limited resources – chances are you are more worried about whether anyone will even show up than if you manage to pull off a Perfect Event.

What if No One Shows Up?

Hopefully, none of you have had to ask that question before an event – and I’m guessing there are more of you reading this that have had than anyone would guess. Generally, events work out and Perfect Events are rare but successful events are not rare when you put a little effort and planning into the details.

Wesley gave great advice for those events when “no one shows up” – I put that in quotes because I don’t think most of us have had a true zero attendance for an event. If you’ve had an experience like that – leave a comment and share why you think it happened so we can learn from it. Wesley’s advice for those events with few attendees was to remain flexible and use the lower than expected attendance numbers as an opportunity to give those attendees the best experience ever.

“Not all events are a success; that’s the one thing you can’t control.”

If you throw a party and only 4 people show up, take photos, create an atmosphere online and more importantly, offline for those 4 people. You have far more resources per person to give them a great time than you would if 100 people were there so make use of it to give those people the best event experience ever.

Social media gives you the chance to show how awesome your event was, regardless of how many people were there by providing you so many different channels and ways to send your stories: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. Use social media and this advice to implement Wesley’s Big Secret so that none of your events will ever be failures.

Now that I’ve shared Wesley’s big secret from Houston Netsquared, let’s talk about the real guts of his presentation and how you can increase your event marketing to get closer to having more Perfect Events by using social media.

Different Strategies for Different Types of Events

Wesley recommends identifying which category your event falls into to first determine the best social media marketing strategy to use from three event types:

Traditional Events

Social Media Based Events

MultiFaceted Events

Each of these different event types will have different end goals for determining if they are a success. You’ll also typically find the events have very different implementation strategies, budgets, and audience sizes.

Wesley also shares the four types of people you want involved, ideally in both the planning and attending of an event. Those are:

Traditional Events

Traditional events include events that have been around for a while and are usually an annual fundraising activity. Wesley shared ways he’s helped traditional events integrate social media into their events to make it easy and build awareness of the organization’s cause in addition to helping attract new participants.

Wesley states that “Events give people the opportunity to experience the struggle that you are going through to get to the finish line.” Find ways your attendees can share their accomplishments at each milestone during the event to enhance your social media marketing and event marketing campaigns.

Wesley uses the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure as an example of how to include social media with the teams during the race itself to give the team opportunities to share their experience on social media channels. His team was taking photos at each mile marker and sharing with their online communities as they went through the race.

Another option you can try is to create Foursquare locations at each mile marker. Then encourage your attendees to “Check-In” on Foursquare. Then, use Wesley’s suggestion to offer messages at each mile with words of encouragement or a funny message on Foursquare so when they check-in, they receive a boost.

Nonprofit organizations use these special events to raise money and the key is to get your donors personally involved when you plan your next event. Think of ways to give people an experience and then, add the social media element by thinking of ways to make that experience share-able online.

Social Media Based Events

Social Media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have inspired fundraising and cause awareness events for nonprofits like Twestivals and Foursquare Day. These events are very different in that they typically aren’t planned in advance by a nonprofit organization. Instead, people who are active in their local communities and on social media sites online come together and organize the event.

Nonprofit event organizers should try and see the perspective that the people participating in social media based events are using their money as a “ballot” they give by attending events they’ve learned about on their social networks.

Unlike traditional events where you are trying to make your event share-able online, social media based events begin online and the key to success is to take the online excitement and buzz offline and in a format where people will come out and “vote” for your cause. This requires your organization to first be online and simple to communicate with. Wesley suggests you regularly look at who is following you on twitter and Facebook that are truly passionate about your cause and engaging online with you. Reach out to these “Superhero Volunteers” online and ask them to help organize and promote your next social media based event.

Multifaceted Events

These events are harder to describe because they take on so many forms. In fact the branding and purpose can differ dramatically depending on who you ask at the event. Large conferences like SXSW and Love Austin Week span multiple days and locations, and managing these requires an ability to reach a point and then just let them run. Some of these events will take on multiple themes and some events, like Movember, will span multiple cities and countries.

To make the best use of social media to promote multifaceted events, Wesley says “Go Nuts!” and find ways to get everyone involved and having fun online and offline. The best way to get people involved is to find ways to personalize the experience each attendee has at the event. For example, one event Wesley helped organize hired an artist who did charicatures of attendees for their t-shirts.

Here are a few more ideas that can help you personalize your event:

Personalize cupcakes, cookies, and other sweets for each participant

Come up with a signature cocktail for the event

Create a website just for your event

Offer customizable swag bags that your attendees can select items for before the event

Include Online Participants by sharing their tweets and offering event videos and photos on your website

Rent a photo booth or hire a photographer and send attendees home with a photograph in a frame highlighting your event

Succeeding in the Social Economy

I want to conclude my wrap-up with Wesley’s words of wisdom to keep in mind when you are venturing out into social media.

The social economy doesn’t use the same exchange that we do at a merchant level… Give before you ask and be mindful of your social withdrawals.

You have to sometimes have a team member or partner who helps you get to the next step – Don’t feel like you have to go it alone and you’ll go further when you combine resources. This is particularly true when you are combining social media channels to promote your event.

Be like-able and make it easy for people to find you and talk to you!

I want to thank Wesley for a great presentation that gave tons of helpful ways to make your events more successful with social media marketing. You can find Wesley’s slides from his presentation here – Social Media and Events: An Evolution.

On Tuesday, I had the honor of co-hosting this month’s Houston NetSquared meetup featuring Jeff D. Frey, the Web services manager in Rice University’s IT Department. Jeff’s role at Rice is to help all the different departments within the university as well as nonprofits in the Houston community identify the best software tools and then install and integrate them.

Jeff spoke to the members of the Houston NetSquared on the good and bad things about open source technologies. He approached the topic from the perspective of nonprofit organizations and their communities based on his experience working with all kinds of software and hardware solutions at Rice. Here’s a wrap-up of Jeff Frey’s presentation “Open Source … and Six Blind Men.”

Six Blind Men?

Jeff began his presentation with one of my favorite parable’s 6 Blind Men and an Elephant. Each man had a different impression of the Elephant after feeling just one part.

Jeff Frey uses this parable to explain that “Much like the elephant trainer, my role is to basically show you around the elephant of open source”.

The Open Source Elephant

Just like the six blind men in the parable, Jeff described that there are six different perspectives in nonprofit organizations, and each of them typically only sees one piece of the total project being planned.

Jeff describes the people that typically see each perspective’s piece of the open source elephant and talks about what he recommends nonprofit organizations should be aware of with open source tools to make sure each group’s perspective fits into the total picture and everyone in your nonprofit organization likes to use the new solution.

The 6 Perspectives of Open Source:

1) Community

— This is the group of people that follow the open source software or product and is usually a tight knit group.

According to Jeff, nonprofit organizations should take a look at how strong an open source’s community is. A strong community means the product will probably be better supported and have more “one off” or edge-case customizations that your nonprofit can benefit from for free or lower cost than if you had to pay for the custom development yourself.

2) Customers

–- The folks that a nonprofit serves including your members, donors, and visitors to your website.

The great thing about open source from your customers’ perspective is that it can look really high end, has improved stability, and has fewer compatibility issues with web browsers. Open source makes it easier for you to look like you know what you are doing to your customers even if you can barely use a WYSIWYG editor.

3) Management

From the perspective of your Board and those approving the budget for the project, open source is a very appealing option. There are little to no software costs, no programmers, and the potential for no hardware costs. As Jeff put it “You can basically run your whole nonprofit on open source tools with virtually no software costs.”

4) Employees

-– The people most affected by the software package you select, the ones using it daily and sometimes this includes your volunteers.

Your employees and volunteers using the software everyday will want to know that the software will work and will be easy to use. Different open source software options have varying levels of features and ease of use. You’ll want to look at how much training your employees will need before they use the new product and if it has the features your organization needs. Jeff suggests starting with something little that your staff does daily with the current solution and see how the proposed software performs with that task. Then keep adding new daily tasks, one at a time, and test them before deciding on a particular software product.

5) Developers

–- The application developers that constantly support and add new features and functionality to the open source software.

“It wouldn’t be an open source product without having developers”, Jeff rightly states. When looking at open source software, you should find out what are the code base standards and ask if there is a good, available API. Find out what the language on which the software is built because some are more difficult to use, which increases programming hours for custom projects.

6) Support Staff

— These are your designated “power users” and can be internal or external to your organization. Often this will be an IT consulting firm or Web design agency who customizes and updates your software.

When looking at open source solutions from the perspective of your power users, you will want to find an open source product that has a strong network of partners and support professionals. Ask if the software has a regular schedule to roll out new versions and patches and find out about the hardware, network, back-up and maintenance processes and costs when comparing software.

Tell Us which of the six perspectives you think you fall under in our comments below!

I probably fall under the power user perspective in most cases, and in particular when talking about Tendenci. I spend most of my days inside a Tendenci website updating content, adding events, creating training documentation, etc. and I honestly love it.

Has the Elephant Left the Building?

With all the excitement we’ve felt here with the open source release of Tendenci last week – we also recognize the hesitation and concerns from our current clients and their community. We want to keep the conversation going to address your questions and I thought I’d add my personal takeaways from Jeff’s Netsquared presentation and invite you to tell me what else you’d like to talk about.

Jeff Frey surprised us with a slide on Tendenci in his presentation and Jeff shared his feedback on our newly open source CMS to the Houston NetSquared members. Here’s what he thinks about Tendenci:

Tendenci has a very new/young community of developers and followers and his advice to me was to “get in the mindset of moving in the direction of building your developer community”.

Tendenci is written in the Python programming language, which is the language that “all the cool kids are coding in now,” including what Rice undergrad programmers are learning.

Unlike a lot of open source software, Tendenci has more than just a forum to support its clients and community; it has real people to call, email, and come Hang Out with.

One important quote I heard Jeff say at NetSquared was “Open source doesn’t mean free as in no cost, it means free as in liberated.” And throughout Jeff’s presentation, he reiterated that while the software code is freely available, and anyone can download a copy and start using it for free… there are different costs associated with open source software that can include things like hosting, IT support staff, development to customize the platform for your organization, and hardware costs.

To provide you with an example: you can create a free twitter account to use but you then may have to pay for…

the computer or laptop that you access twitter from,

the internet connection to connect to twitter, Then,

the designer to customize your twitter landing page,

the staff member or to manage your twitter communications,

the web marketing agency to train you and your staff how to use twitter…

As you can see, each of these extras come with an extra cost. It is no different with other open source software, including Tendenci. Open source software does greatly reduce the total cost of the project so that more nonprofit organizations can afford to have better tools to operate online and offline.

I want to leave you with a comment from an audience member Tuesday night at NetSquared:

” The thing about Open Source that I love is there is a huge community helping find the bugs before I have to find it, and fixes it, and I don’t have to pay for it or deal with it.”

While Silicon Valley and the Bay Area can at times be a whole world apart from Houston, there are still many things the two areas have in common – tech, geeks, startups, non-profits, and people passionate about changing the world through technology. If you’re in the Houston area, hopefully you’ve made it out to one of the Houston NetSquared meetings that Schipul hosts. They’re always fun and informative – a great way to bounce ideas of others working at the intersection of technology and do-gooding. Ed & Katie started the Houston group back in 2006, and have kept it going strong since.

I was excited to check out the San Francisco NetSquared group when I moved to this part of the world, but unfortunately couldn’t make the meeting that took place right after my move. And then summer hit, which those of us in the Bay Area know, is traditionally a quiet time for groups and activities. At the end of summer, the NetSquared community managers sent out word to group members that the previous organizer was no longer able to run the group, and asked if there was any interest in taking over those duties. Being a NetSquared fan girl, I threw my hat in the ring and offered to take the reins. I was lucky enough to have a very enthusiastic community that offered support, and fortunately two awesome folks – Regina Walton and Dave Theriault – stepped up to serve as co-organizers too. Together, the three of us are totally awesome. And no, I’m not biased at all!

I am super excited to get things kicked off with the November Meetup. Young Han from GoVoluntr will be speaking to the group about how he got started in the technology startup space, and what challenges non-profits have today and how technology can help solve them. Young is an amazing guy; I first met him at a Mountain View Chamber event hosted by our friends at Westminster Promotions. Bonus points went to me for immediately understanding what he was trying to go with GoVoluntr; we hit it off from there and have since had several great conversations surrounding do-gooding in technology. Young’s philosophy with GoVoluntr matched the Schipul Core Values so well; it was clear we’d be friends!

GoVoluntr has had an exciting fall, being asked to join the 500 Startups class. They’ve moved in to the group’s space in Mountain View (bonus to being just down the road from us in Sunnyvale – closer for coffee!) and Young and his team are getting their brains crammed with all sorts of amazing training and knowledge. Check out the recent post about their class from TechCrunch, and if you’re a Bay Area non-profit or do-gooder (yes, that’s totally a word) be sure to check out GoVoluntr!! Young and his team have built an amazing tool for connecting volunteers with those who need them, and giving volunteers a way to share and track their activity.

If you’re in San Francisco or the Silicon Valley area, we’d love to see you at a NetSquared event! If you can’t join us on November 8th, no worries – we’ve got speakers lined up for December and January, so join us then! And if you’d be interested in presenting to the group, or know someone who might be, please do let me know! We’re always on the look out for new ways to geek out over tech.

Our frank round table discussion is a way to celebrate what we’ve learned, share our experiences to help others avoid some headache and to celebrate having made it through another busy and successful year.

Join us for ‘FailsGiving’ – we won’t be serving turkey or yams, but will enjoy our shared tasty tidbits all the same.

NetSquared is focused on the intersection of technology and social impact. We create opportunities for all those involved in creating change to connect: whether you are a nonprofit or a foundation, a designer or a developer, a changemaker or an entrepreneur.

The Houston NetSquared Meetup is focused on ‘Social changemakers and technological forerunners coming together at Net Tuesday events to mix, swap stories and ideas, build new relationships, and reinforce the online NetSquared community.â€

Ryan (Ryan Marsh, president of the Layla Grace Foundation) speaks geek and can talk to the more technical challenges facing online non-profit organizations from a technology and a human perspective.

Having spent a lot of time over the last 15 years involved with Non-Profits, I can say the way they function has changed substantially over the last 3-5 years with society’s rapid adoption of new technology and the introduction of Social Media into the mix. In order for a NPO to stay viable, I believe they have to passionately embrace technology and the social-sphere in order to overcome challenges, meet goals, and, most importantly in today’s economy, do more with a LOT less.

The Layla Grace Foundation was founded by Ryan and Shanna Marsh in April 2010 in honor of their daughter Layla Grace Marsh who gained her eternal wings on March 9, 2010. You can learn more about the foundation at their site: http://laylagrace.org/ . With more than 16 thousand Facebook Fans, I was keen to hear what a very successful and VERY young Non-Profit had to say about the technology choices they had made.

Ryan did a wonderful job of balancing the very tender topic of childhood cancer with talking about the tech tools the Layla Grace Foundation has used to serve their mission:

“The Layla Grace Children’s Cancer Research Foundation is a non-profit organization focused on the discovery of new treatment options for children with high-risk cancer. We empower parents with the tools to become effective advocates for their children and raise public consciousness about our cause.”

In fact, Ryan offered up such a phenomenal top 10 list for Non-Profit Technology choices’ I was taking notes like a mad woman in order to be able to share them here. What I really like about this list is that it came from someone who has a history in the Tech Industry and has also tested, evaluated, tried and failed fast with a lot of the technology options out there today. This is a tried and true list of options that have floated to the top of the list for a functioning Non-Profit Organization and it can save other organization out there a lot of time and money.

So, without further ado, here is the Non-Profit Top 10 Tech Tools Recommended by the Layla Grace Foundation: